


ink on his fingers and a smile on his face

by scioscribe



Category: American Revolution RPF
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:38:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five pictures John has of Alex, and one Alex makes of himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ink on his fingers and a smile on his face

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ossapher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/gifts).



> [herowndeliverance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/pseuds/herowndeliverance) made sure this story got into the world with its shoes tied; [ossapher](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/pseuds/ossapher) was gracious enough to want to share her gift-fic with the world.

**1**

John has no intention of charging for this. It’s one picture. When he walks by the Empire State Building and sees tourists fumbling with their newly-acquired selfie sticks, he just takes the picture for them; he doesn’t give them a business card and insist on getting paid for his time. This is a favor to Lafayette. As far as John’s concerned, what are friends-of-friends for, if not quickie headshots?

And even under other circumstances, it would be no problem at all to snap a quick pic of Alex Hamilton. On the street, he would do it without thinking. He could see himself taking a candid shot for his gallery work, even, because John has a gift for picking individual images out from the collage of life. And Alex, in his office doorway, shrugging off a thinned-at-the-elbows black wool overcoat with an unmelted snowflake on the collar, is a good image. He is five feet seven inches of compressed, vibrating narrative, and a picture speaks a thousand words.

So, as it turns out, does Alex Hamilton. Per minute.

“Publius needs a complete overhaul and redesign, and getting even a halfway decent—not that you’re only halfway decent, you’re actually really, really, absurdly good, you don’t need to do weddings or things like this—photo on the about page would be a start. I tried? With selfies? But I think I break cameras, I’m always making this face.”

He makes a face John can’t even describe. It’s like his muscles are made of rubber—cartoon rubber, even, the kind that would bounce a ball off a sidewalk and into outer space.

He is ridiculous. John can’t even trust himself to reach his camera in time, so he takes the picture with his phone and then double-checks it: it’s come out perfectly.

“That was just for me, if that’s okay,” John says. “Just for my book. So what’s Publius?”

Alex spends an hour telling him about Publius. Publius, as it turns out, is a political news/analysis blog Alex has started, which is picking up actual traction lately. It recently had an article retweeted by the White House Twitter account and Alex has responded by _losing his shit_ —he has, he informs John, recently bought a suit.

He is wearing the suit. It is not, John is qualified to know, a good suit. He hates that he knows that: that some part of him will always be able to tell, on sight, whether or not menswear is off-the-rack. What Stevenson story was it where the man drank gin to shame himself for preferring vintages? That’s John and fabric, wearing polyester to mortify his taste for hand-tailored merino.

“I want people to take Publius seriously,” Alex says.

“It sounds like people do take Publius seriously. You just want—you know what? You don’t want this picture. It’s going to look like every other asshole’s picture. Not that you look like an asshole—”

But Alex is smiling and holding up his hands. “You’re the photographer, man.”

So he lets John have the candid shot he wants, and it’s Alex’s face right as he steps into his office, Alex’s face as he sees his laptop, his window, and the stack of books on his desk. The look on his face is this irresistible combination of exultation and exhaustion. You would want to read his blog. John already has it bookmarked. And he’s already noticed something about it.

“You could do with some pictures on this,” he says, tapping the screen on his phone to emphasize his point. It zooms in, unhelpfully, on the text.

“I know, right? I’m working on getting better at it.” He shows John a photo that, optimistically, could be of a building.

If John looks at it for too long, he’ll despair. “How about you handle the words and I’ll handle the photography?”

Alex blinks. “Is that, like, a _reverse_ job offer? Because that would be amazing, but I can’t pay you a lot, or even a normal amount. I’m basically kept alive by Patreon and an ad banner at this point. Tending bar barely pays the rent. Someone bought me canned soup off my Amazon wish list the other day and that’s the only reason I had dinner.”

“I’m not living from soup can to soup can,” John says. “I can take one or two risks.”

“Okay,” Alex says. “You’re a perfectly good gift horse and I’m going to stay out of your mouth. I get that, one hundred percent.” He smiles and John reflexively takes another picture. He doesn’t want the moment to go to waste.

**2**

The next time John takes Alex’s picture, it’s just as a joke.

“You need to talk to someone about your pathological reluctance to ever take an umbrella with you.”

“Shh,” Alex says, maneuvering around him. “I know this is a long shot, but do we by some miracle have a stack of towels that are fresh out of the dryer?”

No, John thinks, but he wants to live in a world where that’s possible. “I can give you a gym towel.”

“No thank you,” Alex says, shuddering. “Can I dry myself off on your sweatshirt?”

John tosses it to him. “Did you get the interview?”

“Did I get the interview? Did I _get_ the interview? You and I are going to be talking to Senator Washington _tomorrow_. At _breakfast_. Which, hey, free food.” He rubs his face into John’s sweatshirt and then tucks it up around his hair and scrubs vigorously there, too. When he lets it go, the sleeves of it droop down like elephant ears. John reaches for his camera without even thinking about it, because there’s a shimmering sheen of rainwater in the Cupid’s bow of Alex’s mouth and beads of it in his eyebrows and he looks like an exhilarated, bedraggled—something. Clown? Weird elephant clown?

But the picture doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the first time he’s felt that way.

“Hang on,” he says. “Stay like that. Just—don’t move.”

It’s only later that he realizes he’s drawn Alex the bedraggled elephant clown on the back of their invitation to breakfast with Washington.

Luckily, as it turns out, Washington gets kind of a kick out of it.

**3**

Alex delights in John’s rare shows: if John would let him, he would stand out on a street corner with a sandwich board over his chest advertising for them. As is, he just wanders through the gallery and buttonholes everyone who is standing even remotely near a display: “Isn’t this great? Isn’t he great? This one’s my favorite.”

“Okay,” John says, grabbing Alex by his elbow and steering him away from the alarmed patrons. “One, that’s the eighteenth different picture you’ve called your favorite, and two, galleries are supposed to be subtle places where people drink bad alcohol and eat mediocre cubes of cheese. Not where the artist’s roommate lectures them on composition.”

“Oh, come on, someone lectures someone every time I go to a show with you.”

“Because we only go to my shows. _You_ always lecture someone.”

Alex rocks back on his heels, grinning. “Admit it. You thought these were boring before you met me.”

He did, actually, and for a lot of reasons. There’s a directness to John’s art, if he even wants to call it that, that people mistake for technique; they compliment him on the deliberate, unflinching baldness of his shots as if they’re seeing his camera and not his subjects. The work he does with Alex is the work he’s proudest of. No one talks about how beautifully he captures suffering. They talk about the suffering. John wants to take the kind of pictures where the image burns through and leaves people talking about something other than the color of the fire. Instead, they say how interesting he is, and they eat little cubes of cheese, and they all, for the most part, know his family. They think it’s nice that the Laurens boy has this kind of gift. And so politically active!

But also, he thinks, and his mouth is dry, _also—I thought everything was boring before I met you._

“Come here,” he says, and he drags Alex away from the crowd. They’re jammed up in a little alcove with a wire sculpture that Alex eyes as if it’s thinking of attacking him.

And he takes Alex’s picture.

Alex rubs his eyes from the flash. “What was that for? You only ever do that when I look ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous,” John says, not to confirm, but to summarize himself.

It’s a terrible picture, really: there’s a glare from a lamp on Alex’s face, a shiny white blotch of a spotlight, and Alex’s eyes are half-closed. It’s a bad photo of a good person.

John says, “I think I’m meant to do something other than art.”

“Obviously,” Alex says, getting a look at the picture.

**4**

Being a full-time photojournalist turns out to be a lot like being a part-time photojournalist, only he gets to spend more time with Alex, which has—now that he’s realized this enormous Sisyphean boulder of a crush—its good sides and its bad sides.

He doesn’t take as many photographs of Alex now. He wants to—needs to, probably—work out a way to get blood on the lens of his camera without getting it on the viewfinder; to be the clear glass through which Publius’s readers see the world without getting stained by what he takes in. But for right now, when it’s all new, and he’s had a bad day taking pictures of corrupt men, broken handrails, and starving children, sometimes he wants one thing where he can flinch. Or, if not flinch, at least editorialize.

So he draws Alex. Alex moves restlessly for eighteen hours a day—even his fingers are a blur when he types—but he will stay still for John. John wonders, but doesn’t ask, if this is a rest for him, too.

“I always look like a turtle in these,” Alex says.

“I’m out of practice drawing people,” John admits.

“But you’re in practice drawing _turtles_?”

“I like turtles.”

“You like me,” Alex says. “Maybe all your turtles should look a little bit like me, too. That’s only fair.”

**5**

The next time John draws Alex, it’s from imagination, and he thinks, _I can’t show this to anyone_.

He really is clear glass. There is no room to deny anything that’s on this page.

He crumples it up and throws it away.

 

**(okay. one more thing.)**

“I need your honest opinion on something,” Alex says.

“Yes,” John says, without looking up, “you’re a better writer than Thomas Jefferson.”

“Right? He’s all flowery language and no actual points. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s about art?” And the tilt in his voice is so uncharacteristic that John _does_ look up, because Alexander Hamilton makes questions into statements, not statements into questions.

Alex is holding up a bunch of pieces of poster-board.

“This is from _Love Actually_ ,” John says. “Did you watch _Love Actually_?”

“Just this part of it on the internet when I Googled ‘gestures,’” Alex says. He flips the first poster over.

 _I REALLY LIKE YOU_ , the poster says.

John’s whole body goes numb. All he can feel is his heart, and not in a romantic way, but just as an unforgiving flex of muscle which is pounding away, almost viciously, like a knock that will wake him up from whatever dream he’s having.

Flip. _I THINK WE MAKE A GREAT TEAM._

Flip. In smaller print: _I know there is no actual art in this so far, but it’s performance art, which still counts. I could do this on a subway platform and you would have to tip me for it. Not that you should tip me. I’m just saying that this technically counts._

John makes some noise. Even he doesn’t know if it’s a laugh or not.

Flip. _I ACTUALLY DID NOT LIKE THIS SCENE IN LOVE ACTUALLY._

Flip. _I MEAN HER HUSBAND WAS IN THE OTHER ROOM. THAT’S YOUR BEST FRIEND, DUDE._

Flip. _BUT NEITHER OF US IS SEEING ANYONE, SO._

Flip. _I WOULD LIKE TO KISS YOU, IF THAT’S OKAY._

Flip. A very, very clumsily drawn set of stick figures with their head melded together into a shapeless blob. One of them is labeled “A. Ham” and the other is labeled “J. Laur.”

John points. “That’s me?”

“That’s you.”

“Because I thought maybe it said J. Law, and you wanted my opinion on this whole slideshow you were making for Jude Law. Or Jennifer Lawrence.”

“No,” Alex says. “It’s all for you.” And he’s leaning forward, all of his weight on his toes. John thinks that if _this_ were how he looked in his biography photo, Publius would never lack for visitors or for patrons, because Alex right now is the reason metaphors were invented. Someone would look at him and say, no, there is nothing he is like, and fumble for comparisons. They would invent demigods just to get close.

John really should take a picture of him.

But he will have time, because this is, as it turns out, mostly just how Alex looks at him once he’s given up on being careful.

“So what do you think?” Alex says.

John says, “Beautiful.”

 


End file.
